Caspar David Friedrich is generally regarded as the finest German painter of the Romantic era. But his pictures have not often been seen in this country and only one, the National Gallery’s Winter Landscape of 1812, is to be found on display in a British museum. “German Art for Russian Imperial Palaces”, an exhibition which opened recently in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, contains no fewer than eleven works by the artist. Today’s painting is my own favourite among them. The imminence of St Brendan the Navigator’s feast day, which falls next Thursday, also steered me towards it. The work is simply entitled On a Sailing-boat and it was painted towards the end of 1818.
Friedrich was forty-four years old at the time but he seems to have felt that in many respects his life was only just beginning. Two years earlier he had been elected to the Dresden Academy of Arts, a position which carried the modest but none the less significant annual salary of 150 thalers. The prospect of a regular income gave him the courage to propose marriage to the young woman with whom he had fallen in love, Caroline Bommer, the twenty-five year-old daughter of a
